About the Author

Anne Rice is the author of thirty-seven books, including the Vampire Chronicles, the Lives of the Mayfair Witches, and the Wolf Gift book series. Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941 and grew up there and in Texas. She lived in San Francisco with her husband, the poet and painter, Stan Rice until 1988, when they returned to New Orleans to live with their son, Christopher. In 2006, Rice moved to Rancho Mirage, California. She died in 2021.

Reviews

“Taltos is the third book in a series known as the lives of the Mayfair witches. . .Their haunted heritage has brought the family great wealth, which is exercised from a New Orleans manse with Southern gentility; but of course such power cannot escape notice . . . or challenge . . . Rice is a formidable talent. . . . [Taltos]is a curious amalgam of gothic, glamour fiction, alternate history, and high soap opera.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Anne Rice will live on through the ages of literature.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“An intricate, stunning imagination.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Spellbinding . . . mythical . . . Anne Rice is a pure storyteller.”—Cosmopolitan

“Beautifully written.”—Kirkus Reivews (starred review)

“Her power of invention seems boundless. . . . She has made a masterpiece of the morbid, worthy of Poe's daughter. . . . It is hard to praise sufficiently the originality of Miss Rice.”—The Wall Street Journal

Cutting-edge gene mapping intertwines with ancient mysteries in this continuation of Rice's series of novels about witches and the supernatural. A ``taltos'' is the superhuman result of the crossbreeding of two human witches who possess an extra chromosome; almost a monster, the creature is capable of beastly behavior fuelled by an extraordinary sex drive. In Lasher , the eponymous offspring of Michael Curry and Rowan Mayfair of the New Orleans Mayfair witch clan proved to be just such a mutant; before he was slain, he repeatedly raped his own mother, siring a little ``goblin'' daughter, Emaleth. This new novel features a second taltos, also fathered by Curry, but mothered by a 13-year-old sexpot niece of Rowan's named Mona, who is herself the most powerful witch of the Mayfair clan. Other plot elements involve renegade members of the secret order of Talamasca, who want to kidnap and crossbreed two taltoses; a 200-year-old taltos from New York named Ashlar, who is posing as a toy-industry magnate specializing in dolls; and a dwarf called Samuel from the witches' holy glen in Donnelaith, Scotland. Pulsing with a persisent sense of foreboding, the novel is soggy with meandering, atmospheric prose that verges on softcore porn. And, as usual, what happens in the book is clearly less important to the author than the number of chills she can send down readers' spines. She has not lost her touch. 600,000 first printing; Literary Guild main selection. (Sept.)

"Taltos is the third book in a series known as the lives of the Mayfair witches. . .Their haunted heritage has brought the family great wealth, which is exercised from a New Orleans manse with Southern gentility; but of course such power cannot escape notice . . . or challenge . . . Rice is a formidable talent. . . . [Taltos]is a curious amalgam of gothic, glamour fiction, alternate history, and high soap opera."-The Washington Post Book World

"Anne Rice will live on through the ages of literature."-San Francisco Chronicle

"An intricate, stunning imagination."-Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Spellbinding . . . mythical . . . Anne Rice is a pure storyteller."-Cosmopolitan

"Beautifully written."-Kirkus Reivews (starred review)

"Her power of invention seems boundless. . . . She has made a masterpiece of the morbid, worthy of Poe's daughter. . . . It is hard to praise sufficiently the originality of Miss Rice."-The Wall Street Journal